From The Vault: No-Go-Tiations

READERS- In case you're experiencing "deja vu all over again" with the debt ceiling "crisis," it's not your imagination. Here's the Hope n' Change cartoon and commentary exactly as it appeared on July 13, 2011.  Sadly, the reference to Barry threatening to withhold Social Security checks is as timely today as it was over two years ago...




There's a time-honored saying that "When the going gets tough, the tough threaten defenseless little old people." Mind you, it's only a time-honored saying in the Democratic party, but it's still as true - and despicable - today as it ever was.

In his effort to blackmail Republicans into agreeing to potentially job-killing tax hikes on businesses and investors, Barack Obama has announced that he may choose to not send out Social Security checks to senior citizens on August 3rd, sneering "there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

Which strikes us as a little odd. After all, if no debt ceiling agreement is reached, the government's bills will be paid in the order that Obama decrees. And money is flowing in to Social Security every day, meaning that its "coffers" should be full-to-bustin' with cash which has allegedly been accumulating for decades...suggesting that it should be other programs that bring in no money which should be the first to go unfunded.

But nooOOOooo, the president would prefer to inflict the greatest and most visible pain that he possibly can... essentially making his elderly hostages shriek in terror in hopes of getting the Republicans to pay a $2 trillion ransom.

Of course, the president - who has claimed he's "bent over backwards" to negotiate with the Republicans - has yet to put a single actual fiscal proposal on the table. And he's flat out refused any short term solutions, saying that our country is "not a banana republic." And he should know, considering that he's the only president to hail from banana-growing Indonesia and Hawaii.

And so the debt-ceiling game goes on, with no guaranteed winners...but millions of guaranteed losers as long as Obama's hostage-taking strategy goes unchallenged.

Millions of elderly people like this are afraid of losing their Social Security checks and...no, wait.
This is just Obama's taxpayer-supported Aunt Zeituni who is watching her soap operas. She'll be fine.

Debt To America!

Despite the risk of triggering a national credit default and worldwide financial meltdown, Barack Hussein Obama called House Speaker John Boehner yesterday to announce that he would never, ever, in a million-jillion years negotiate on America's debt ceiling because "that's not the way I'll get virgins in Heaven."

Which, no doubt, will come as a great relief to 72 young boys and/or terrified sheep.

Ha, ha! We're just kidding around, of course, since the president has set the precedent for not taking this whole potential crisis seriously.

If he was taking it seriously, he might heed these words by a Democrat Senator: "Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit."

That Senator, of course, was Barack Hussein Obama in 2006 - who now says that he was just "making a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country." It's nice to hear him acknowledge that his only political experience before becoming president consisted of not doing what was important for the country.

But now he's a different man, and he's putting the needs of the country first. Unless, of course, the citizens of that country would like to visit a national park, get a job, have a functioning healthcare system, or protect their economy from a suicide bomber.

BONUS CARTOONS!

Popular Opinion

90 million Americans got a boost to their self-esteem this week when the Obama administration and mainstream media declared that not working is proof of popularity!

At least, that's what they're claiming for the Obamacare website, which is apparently so screamingly popular that almost nobody can actually use it.  And impressively, of the excruciatingly small number of people who have somehow managed to machete their way into the online jungles of Healthcare.gov, it is estimated that 99 out of 100 of their applications will fail to go through the system because of poor design, poor implementation, and the fact that Joe Biden is using the Healthcare.gov computer to play "Farmville."

Based on our own testing here at Hope n' Change, it's been impossible to even log on to the site after six days of trying. Although in fairness, we did make some new progress today: we got a message that the system was down, but we could call a customer support "specialist" who's likely had neither training nor a background check, give them all of our personal identification data, and then tell them that we're experiencing "error Reference ID: 0.cdd7c17.1381088033.694c3ba."  

Which, coincidentally, is probably the same number which will eventually be printed on our government-issued toe tag.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment to the president is that his healthcare website couldn't be included in his government shutdown, because it would have to be in service to be taken out of service.

Still, the website does have something in common with our other national monuments: it's completely blocked from public view by government barricades like this one...

BONUS CARTOON: Blown Circuit...